The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Brown had less reason to be proud of another skill of his—playwriting. But that didn’t stop him from bragging about his play Sertorius, a tedious tragedy about a Roman patriot that was performed nine times by one of the greatest actors of the day, Junius Brutus Booth. The critics had loved Seriorius, he boasted; they’d said it was difficult to find a single jarring line in it, a reaction that, if you asked him, David Paul Brown, was quite odd, since he’d written the whole thing on horseback. He’d been trying a big case in Philadelphia at the time, but his wife and children had been vacationing thirty miles outside the city. Desiring to spend his nights in the company of his wife, he’d left the city at dusk each evening and trotted until midnight, and to make the journey seem swifter, occupied himself by creating his play while jogging along. Doing so had been no easy feat. “Composing upon all fours is sometimes expedient, but seldom very agreeable,” he was wont to say, “or profitable.”

  Still, profit wasn’t what motivated the multitalented David Paul Brown, or so he would always insist. He had been born rich, and later his legal work had made him even richer; by 1831, after fifteen years of law practice, his professional income exceeded one hundred thousand dollars—the equivalent of several million dollars today.

  No matter. To hear him tell it, he spent money as fast as he earned it, spent it out of principle and not extravagance, spent it because if he had too much money around, he’d become indolent and lose in fame what he gained in wealth. And it was fame that, to steal a phrase from the man from whom he claimed to have learned everything, was his spur. When he was a child he’d been forbidden by his parents, kind-hearted Quakers though they were, to read the playwright. But he’d disobeyed those well-meaning parents, sought out the prohibited book, and by the age of ten, made himself master of all within.

  Even so, his early days as a lawyer and orator were not enviable. He was admitted to the Philadelphia bar at the tender age of twenty-one but, to hear him tell it, weeks, months, finally a whole year rolled by without the tranquillity of his office being disturbed by a single client. Or, for that matter, by a single friend, for as he soon sadly observed, even the courteous shrank from and shunned the unfortunate. Then one day while he was walking near the courts, he noticed a crowd of people surrounding someone, he couldn’t determine who it was, and shouting epithets about cruelty and barbarity. He pushed forward to see what the commotion was all about and came face-to-face with a little girl about eight or nine years old. She was wretchedly attired, her eyes were streaming with tears, and her limbs were covered with welts and dried blood.

  No sooner had he seen the girl than someone in the crowd, surmising that he was in some way connected with the law, demanded that he point out the way to redress. Redress for what, he’d inquired, and an old woman had stepped forward and informed him that the child was one of a large family of German Redemptioners who, upon arriving in the country, had sold themselves as indentured servants to pay back their passage money. Mother and father, sisters and brothers, everyone in the family had been bought, each by a separate owner in a different, distant area of the state. And the little girl, the youngest of the brood, had fallen into the hands of a barbarous individual, a man who had starved her, beaten her, made her flesh raw.

  He, David Paul Brown, was then not yet a parent, but as he was given to saying, nature ever prepares man for those affections which, when they arrive, are the most despotic and resistless in their sway. He took the girl by the hand, ushered her into the chief magistrate’s office, and filed a complaint on her behalf.

  On the day of the trial he came to court fearful that despite intense preparation, his supply of legal lore was so scanty that it would be insufficient to the task at hand. Opposite him were seated the haughty defendant and his counsel—two experienced and distinguished members of the profession, men accustomed to sway the scepter of the mind with kingly hand. They so intimidated him that when it was his turn to speak, he couldn’t find his tongue, and his hands shook like aspen leaves in a storm. But his desire to vindicate the principles of humanity, to right the wrongs that had been done to the little girl, gave him courage, and suddenly all that he had ever known or read came flooding into his mind and his voice burst from his throat, roaring with rage and indignation. He was electrifying, if he did say so himself, so eloquent that the entire assemblage in the courtroom melted into tears, and he won the case handily, so handily that from that time forward his office was thronged with clients, all of them eager to unload their griefs and their pockets, and his life was thronged with friends, all of them eager to enjoy his erudition and his passion.

  He had so many friends. Judges like Robert Porter, head of the Court of Common Pleas—he’d have been impeached if he, David Paul Brown, hadn’t defended him. Journalists like Anne Royall—she’d made him famous all over the country, not just in Philadelphia, by saying in one of those books of hers that he was the very essence of the term “gentleman.” Then there were the actors like Booth. The wits like Robert Waln, who went out on the town all the time but styled himself the hermit of Philadelphia. The scientists like William Chapman. Poor Chapman—people were saying he was the man alluded to in that article that had appeared in the Gazette over the weekend. The Bucks County man who’d been poisoned. How sad for Chapman’s intelligent wife, Lucretia—she’d been his, David Paul Brown’s, friend, too, back when the couple had their school in Philadelphia. Well, as he always said, all our days are anxious, all are made up of clouds and sunshine, and so continuous and unvaried is this truth that this uninterrupted variety actually becomes monotony, still running, as it were, in a circle, traveling over the same ground, and knowing no end.

  Was there a doctor on board, High Constable Blayney called out to a boatload of gawking passengers on the afternoon of September 21, 1831. He and his deputy, Fred Fritz, had taken Lino into their custody in Boston early that morning, escorted him by stagecoach to Rhode Island, then hustled him aboard a Philadelphia-bound steamship where, despite his chains, Lino had eaten a hearty lunch. But just now, suddenly, he had started flailing around, his shackled arms and legs shaking, his head bobbing as if it might fly right off his body. Was it a real fit or just a ruse to create sympathy and get his limbs freed? Blayney couldn’t be sure. He needed a doctor. Right away.

  To his relief, soon after he shouted for one, a top-hatted man stepped forward and announced that he fit the bill. Pushing aside the nosy onlookers, Blayney helped the man to Lino’s side. The doctor grabbed hold of the prisoner. He held him tightly and started talking to him. And that did it. The fit, or whatever it was, subsided.

  Probably, Blayney reckoned, his prisoner had been faking sickness. Blayney wouldn’t put it past him, because he was a wily fellow for sure. According to the Boston police, he’d talked some rich young woman from Cape Cod into marrying him; the poor thing, not realizing she’d just been spared by the police department’s good offices from wedding an unscrupulous scoundrel, had come inquiring after her fiancé’s whereabouts on the day after his arrest. He’d better not interact with such a scoundrel, Blayney decided. He’d best not even speak to him, because there was no telling what kind of trick the fellow might try to pull. Seating himself alongside his prisoner and keeping his mouth closed but his eyes wary, the high constable settled down to enjoy the boat trip as best he could.

  It wasn’t long, however, before Lino, who had already tried to strike up several conversations with the boat’s passengers, interrupted the constable’s effort to savor the voyage. “I wish,” he said to Blayney, “to make some confidential communications to you.”

  “On what subject?”

  “On the subject of Mr. and Mrs. Chapman.”

  “I don’t wish to hear anything. Better keep it to yourself.”

  At this, Blayney changed his seat, putting more space between himself and his prisoner. But shortly after he moved, he saw that the unstoppable fellow was buttonholing his deputy and jabbering away at him.

  What did the prisoner ha
ve to say, Blayney demanded of Fritz when the deputy succeeded in extricating himself from the troublemaker.

  “That he and Mrs. Chapman were married,” Fritz reported. “And that before they were married she used to come to his room very often.”

  Maybe, Blayney reconsidered, he should try to talk to the man. Maybe he could get something useful out of him, something more than the rubbish Fritz had gotten. A little while later, when Lino once again tried to start up a conversation with him, Blayney allowed him to talk.

  He didn’t learn much. “Mrs. Chapman came to me,” Lino boasted. “We had connections a few days before Mr. Chapman’s death.” Blayney wasn’t interested in the prisoner’s sexual exploits. He wanted to know where he came from, whether he had a record, had ever been a pirate or a convict. But although the prisoner had kept saying he wanted to talk, he wouldn’t answer questions, was reluctant to speak about himself, and was interested only in implying that Lucretia Chapman had been up to no good. Frustrated, Blayney resolved to try his luck with Lino another time and brushed him off again.

  That night the fellow was seasick. Clearly no sailor, he. He threw up for hours, and there was no chance to talk to him. But in the morning he was better and still insisting he wanted to talk.

  “So you’ve intimated two or three times,” Blayney said to him coolly. Then, speaking firmly, he made his position clear. “If you’ll answer two questions for me, I’ll listen to you.” When Lino still hesitated, he added, “Nothing you say to me will appear against you if you’re indicted for the murder of Dr. William Chapman.”

  Reassured, Lino agreed to answer whatever he was asked, and Blayney proceeded to interrogate him. “Have you ever been in jail?” he asked.

  “No,” Lino said.

  “Have you ever been a pirate?”

  “No.”

  Blayney wasn’t sure whether to believe him. He wasn’t sure you could believe anything the fellow said. Especially the things that came spewing out of his mouth after he answered the two questions. Things like his saying that Lucretia Chapman had poisoned her husband. That she’d snuck some medicine out of the prisoner’s private medicine chest and put it into her husband’s soup. Or that he’d only married Lucretia because William Chapman, on the verge of dying, had begged him to marry her.

  Blayney managed not to ask him how come, if he was married to Lucretia, he’d been about to marry again, up there in Boston.

  While Blayney and Lino were making their way down to Philadelphia, two physicians arrived at the graveyard of All Saints Church in Andalusia to witness the disinterment of William Chapman. One was Dr. John Hopkinson, a surgeon and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He’d been asked by Bucks County’s deputy attorney general, who’d begun to suspect arsenic as the agent of Chapman’s death, to perform an autopsy and remove any organs that might reveal that William had died unnaturally. The other physician was Dr. Reynell Coates, a general practitioner in the county whose flamboyant wife would one day scandalize his neighbors by being the first local woman to wear bloomers. Coates had come out of medical curiosity and offered to lend Hopkinson any assistance he required.

  The two doctors, their heads protected from the warm September sun by tall beaver hats, watched as the sexton dug into the still soft soil over William’s grave and began slowly raising the coffin. It was slightly indented, as if the weight of the earth had been too much for the casket, they noticed when the sexton set his burden on the ground, and the wood where the corpse’s head would be lying looked damp. Some moisture might have seeped inside, the sexton warned them, then proceeded to pry open the lid.

  As soon as it swung free, the physicians let out a gasp of amazement. It wasn’t entirely because the face staring up at them was hideously black and putrid. No, the sexton had prepared them for that with his talk about moisture. What was amazing to them was the rest of the body. Despite its three months underground, it seemed hardly to have deteriorated at all. A sure sign of arsenic poisoning, both doctors thought, well aware of the use of arsenic in taxidermy.

  In a few moments Hopkinson commenced, right there at the graveside, to cut through William’s burial clothes. He exposed the abdomen and part of the chest, then made a surgical incision into the abdominal cavity. It was oddly firm and resistant, he observed as he cut. Odder still, it was dry, and gave off no offensive odor. Peering down, he stared into the arid cavity. The stomach didn’t look right, he thought. It was unusually dark in color. Could the inside be inflamed? Deciding to check it more thoroughly, and to check the intestines as well, he asked Coates to help him with his examination of the internal organs.

  They began with the small intestine. Hopkinson cut into the twisted tubes in many areas, and he and Coates studied the tissue closely. It, too, was dry, both doctors noticed with surprise. And although the small intestine was slightly distended, it was almost totally empty, except for two or three bits of fecal matter tinged with healthy bile. It was the same with the large intestine, which was also dry, and also virtually empty, containing nothing but a small quantity of bilious matter in the duodenum. Neither intestine showed signs of inflammation. Nor, for that matter, did the spleen, the liver, or the kidneys. As to the gall bladder, it had an unusually healthy appearance.

  Hopkinson decided to leave all these organs intact and to remove only the stomach and duodenum. He tied them at each extremity, loosened them from the corpse, and put them into a clean wine-filled glass jar he had brought with him from Philadelphia. Finally, having noticed as he severed the stomach that a bit of the internal lining of the esophagus appeared inflamed, he removed and bottled the esophagus as well.

  That done, he became tutorial. “Have I missed anything?” he inquired of his inexperienced assistant. “Should I cut further?” He and Coates debated the matter for a while, then agreed that everything that needed examination had been explored. Satisfied, Hopkinson returned William’s body to its coffin, said a fond farewell to his young colleague, and transported the wine jar and its lugubrious contents back to Philadelphia, where he stored it in his home overnight.

  The following morning he took the jar to Pennsylvania Hospital. The hospital, which had been founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1754, was a leading center for medical research, and Hopkinson had arranged to have Chapman’s tissues studied at one of the already venerable institution’s outstanding labs. The lab he had selected was that of Dr. John K. Mitchell, a renowned physician and chemist who had drafted two investigators to assist him: Dr. Joseph Togno, a Philadelphia general practitioner, and Thomas G. Clemson, a young chemist who’d studied at the scientific mecca of the day, the Sorbonne. The three men showed Hopkinson around the big lab, with its many windows and high, flask-lined shelves, and after choosing a well-lit corner of the room, Hopkinson got out his surgical instruments, opened the wine jar, and cut into Chapman’s stomach.

  At once he was struck by a peculiar smell. He’d opened hundreds of bodies and never smelled anything like this before. “I’d compare it to pickled herring,” he said.

  “It more resembles,” Mitchell commented, “the smell of a dried Scotch herring.”

  The others sniffed, too, then Hopkinson stepped back and Mitchell and his assistants went to work, poking at and fingering the exposed tissues. Mitchell was hoping they would be able to detect some solid bodies or particles clinging to the surfaces—if they could, he theorized, it would make it easier to detect the presence of arsenic. But neither he, Togno, nor Clemson encountered anything with any firmness whatsoever, and in the end they resigned themselves to scraping the internal walls of the stomach with smooth-edged bone spoons to collect the walls’ viscid mucus.

  Hopkinson watched them scrape for a time, then excused himself, for Mitchell and his staff would soon be starting their testing, a process that promised to be a lengthy one. They had indicated that they intended to test absolutely everything, solid pieces of the intestines and stomach as well as the mucosa they were so arduously harvesting.

&
nbsp; The local newspapers were having a field day. The American public had long shown an avid interest in articles about robberies and killings and during the 1820s the country’s press had begun capitalizing on this predilection, becoming increasingly sensationalistic. By 1831, according to one writer of the time, crime stories were making up “the ‘Domestic News’ of every journal.… That which was once too shocking for recital, now forms a part of the intellectual regalia which the public appetite demands with a gusto.” Murder was the favorite subject, and just as today, murders that took place within the privileged class excited the greatest interest. By mid-October the Chapman case, with its prominent upper-middle-class victim, was receiving intense coverage, and newspaper reporters, not content with the initial scandalous details, had begun dredging for more. On October 22, 1831, the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin, which had been directing opprobrium chiefly against Lino, calling him “an accomplished scoundrel” and “a villain of no ordinary character,” turned its attention to Lucretia, whom it had previously portrayed only as an object of compassion. She was a “woman of violent passions,” the paper said; her disposition was “fierce and cruel”; the boardinghouse she and her husband had maintained in Philadelphia was a “suspicious” one that on at least one occasion had harbored counterfeiters. This malfeasance was hardly surprising, the Bulletin implied, for Lucretia Chapman “has a brother [Mark] now in the Massachusetts State Prison for forgery and counterfeiting.”